h1. co_opencampaigndata

Web API service for Colorado campaign finance data aggregated from the State of Colorado's "TRACER":http://tracer.sos.colorado.gov/PublicSite/homepage.aspx system. To be deployed at http://co.opencampaigndata.org.

h3. Authors and License

Released under the "GNU GPL v3":http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html license.

(c) 2013 "Erik Cunningham":http://blog.erikwcunningham.com/ (c) 2013 "Ned McClain":http://www.appliedtrust.com/company/bios/ned-mcclain (c) 2013 "Sam Pottinger":http://gleap.org

This alphabetically sorted list only lists principal contributors. A complete list is available in package.json.

h3. Proposed API

The proposed API is available at http://samnsparky.github.io/co_opencampaigndata/.

h3. Background and Motivation

Although Colorado enjoys excellent campaign finance reporting regulation, the state publishes that data through single file archives containing CSV reports. The Colorado Secretary of State Elections Division posts reports (contribution, expenditure, and loan data) through the "Colorado Transparency in Contribution and Expenditure Reporting (TRACER)":http://tracer.sos.colorado.gov/PublicSite/homepage.aspx system. This service provides programmatic access to that dataset along with filtering functionality.

h3. Development Environment and Standards

All code should conform to the "Google JavaScript Style Guidelines":http://google-styleguide.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/javascriptguide.xml. However, in addition to those stylistic guidelines, please follow the following standards:

• This service maintains a minimum of 80% code coverage by automated unit test.
• Follow the "JSDoc":http://usejsdoc.org/ comment format. The service requires all modules to start with a JSDoc comment and all functions exposed as exports to have a valid JSDoc comment. Commenting on other functions should conform to JSDoc but is not necessarily required.
• All unit testing should use "nodeunit":https://github.com/caolan/nodeunit and dependency injection for those tests should use "rewire":https://github.com/jhnns/rewire/.
• Encapsulate potentially long running logic into functions and those functions should return a "Q promise":https://github.com/kriskowal/q.
• An @author tag should be added at the top of the module during a major contribution. That list of authors should be alphabetically sorted. Do not expose email addresses in that tag.
• Interaction with the database should favor stream or equivalent over toArray or equivalent. In other words, avoid loading the entire dataset / subset into memory.

h3. Testing

@cd tests; nodeunit *_test.js@

Testing will require "nodeunit":https://github.com/caolan/nodeunit, "rewire":https://github.com/jhnns/rewire/, and "sinon":https://npmjs.org/package/sinon.

h3. Deployment

This service remains under active development and will be deployed to http://co.opencampaigndata.org. Instructions for deployment will be added at that time.

h3. Bindings and Libraries

• "R by Max Berson":https://github.com/mberson/co_opencampaigndata-R-bindings

h3. Technologies and Resources Used

This open source effort uses:

• "express":http://expressjs.com/
• "JSDoc":http://usejsdoc.org/
• "nodeunit":https://github.com/caolan/nodeunit
• "Node.js":http://nodejs.org/
• "node-mongodb-native":https://github.com/mongodb/node-mongodb-native
• "node-pool":https://github.com/coopernurse/node-pool
• "pycotracer":https://github.com/samnsparky/pycotracer
• "Q":https://github.com/kriskowal/q
• "rewire":https://github.com/jhnns/rewire/
• "sinon":https://npmjs.org/package/sinon